The present invention relates to self-service kiosks and more specifically to a method of controlling applications.
Retailers have a desire to sell their products over networks, such as global networks which are a part of the World Wide Web (WWW or “web”) and which use the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP protocol). These retailers wish to provide Internet server web sites which offer the same features as Internet server web sites available to home shoppers who use their computers to connect to the Internet server web sites.
Kiosks provide a publicly-accessible computing platform for displaying web pages and other web-delivered content from retailer web sites. Kiosks may be located within a retailer's transaction establishment or elsewhere, such as in shopping malls. Kiosks may be easily networked to retailer web sites using the TCP/IP protocol. Web pages from web sites may be displayed using known and available web software, such as Microsoft® Internet Explorer software.
Kiosk owners may wish to integrate web applications with non-web applications on the same kiosk, where non-web applications typically include Microsoft Visual Basic applications, Microsoft Visual C applications, Microsoft Visual C++ applications, and host character based applications (e.g., VT100 emulation used locally). However, integration is difficult. To port all applications to the same technology costs lots of time and money.
Therefore, it would be desirable to provide a method of controlling applications which allows web and non-web applications to run together on the same kiosk.